Don Cheadle: “I wanted to approach the music in the way that I experience his music when I listen to it.”
Photograph: Michael Desmond/AP

Don Cheadle’s directorial debut, Miles Ahead, is centered on the turbulent life of the famous jazz trumpeter Miles Davis.

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But the film is far from a standard biopic. Set mostly in the late 1970s, Miles Ahead plays more like a jazz session than an Oscar-baiting drama: it is unpredictable and deeply soulful and marches to the beat of its own drum.

Miles Ahead begins with a drug-addicted Davis holed up in his Manhattan apartment, haunted by memories of his golden years and ex-wife Frances Taylor (Emayatzy Corinealdi). Ewan McGregor co-stars as a reporter who cons his way into Davis’s apartment. The film was scheduled to receive its world premiere on Saturday, closing the New York Film Festival.

Cheadle’s non-traditional take on tackling the icon was inspired by Davis’s music, the actor/film-maker said during a press conference for the film.

“I wanted to be able to put all of Miles’s music into the film – all that we had the rights to – and I didn’t want to be stuck within one period of music,” Cheadle said.

“Had we told it in a way that was chronological, was cradle to the grave, we would have been pigeonholed into these specific moments that coincided with the music. I wanted to approach the music in the way that I experience his music when I listen to it.”

Cheadle said he had long wanted to make a movie about Davis, but that it all came together when the musician’s nephew, Vince Wilburn, announced that the actor was set to portray him during Davis’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2006.

“It was sort of a pronouncement,” Cheadle said.

Cheadle did not want to make a standard biopic.

“I just wasn’t interested in doing a story that way with this particular artist – this singular artist,” he said. “I wanted to make a movie that I think Miles Davis would have wanted to star in.”

Given the unconventional nature of the project, Cheadle and his co-screenwriter, Steven Baigelman, took some factual liberties: for instance, the reporter McGregor plays is a composite of a number of writers who clamored to interview Davis in the 70s.

They toyed with that issue by framing the story with Davis as a storyteller, recounting parts of his life in his own unique fashion.

“I didn’t want to attempt to be playing cute with the story, and say: this is a true story,” said Cheadle.

Asked how managed to don so many hats in making Miles Ahead, Cheadle joked: “Drugs.”